Friday, October 26, 2007

Plain Jane...

I love peicing. When I am sitting there in front of my little Singer 301, just matching up peices and feeding them through... that's when I rememeber why I like to quilt. Some people really like choosing fabrics or drafting patterns... and I enjoy all of that, too, but the sewing... ah man! I love that! I hadn't done any in quite some time- been busy traveling, trying to get ready for winter, laundry... always the laundry!... and then last night, I staged a little coup on that laundry and I sewed.

Dh's cashier, Jane, is retiring and this weekend is her last days in the store, so I threw together this little table runner. I already had a couple of the blocks from a Stack and Whack class I taught a couple years ago. So I sewed up a couple more, set them in a very traditional fabric- just something from the ole stash and voila! a table runner. Of course, then it had to be quilted and bound, but that only took an hour or so and I think it turned out anything but plain. Simple, yes, but not plain.

I have been quilting a green quilt for the past 3 weeks. It has been a bane to my quilting life, but I finally finished it last night so that I could get this little project done. It wasn't that I didn't like the quilt, it just wasn't going smoothly. I ripped and ripped and tried again. Finally, I just decided that it'd have to just suffice and I trudged on to the finish line. One of the problems with it was the YLI thread called teals. The color of gangrene. It just doesn't have the tensile strength of other YLI colors and it drives me to distraction with the constant breaking. Not that it broke all that much- but when you are working with a high contrast thread- every little start and stop shows! I finally decided to finish what I had started- the 4, yes 4!! outer borders and switched to a different variegated green thread for the body of the quilt. Went much more smoothly, but by then, I was good and sick of the project and wished I could have just taken it off the frame and come back to it next month. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way and once you are all pinned on and the sewing begins, you are pretty much committed. To the loony house! My longsuffering was at it's limit- stress suffering- and so I ad libbed all over that quilt- should have drawn some reference lines, but I was way past that point. Ah, well, all's well that ends well, but there will be no picture to haunt me of that one!

But see? I have a little success story of a table runner to motivate me to keep on trying! Chug chug chug!

so great to have you back Nines...and what a lovely table runner you came up with...surely she will treasure it. sorry the green monster quilt gave you such a time..sometimes quilting just doesn't go so smoothly.